C-Fam Event Connects the Family with Poverty Reduction

By | February 16, 2024

Panelists from family event at UN, February 2024

NEW YORK, February 16 (C-Fam) On the sidelines of the Commission on Social Development at the United Nations, an event highlighted the traditional family’s role in reducing poverty and contributing to healthy societies.

“The family is the most powerful predictor of upward economic mobility and the most important social safety net,” said moderator Lisa Correnti, Executive Vice President of C-Fam, publisher of the Friday Fax.

The event, co-sponsored by C-Fam, the Mission of Belarus to the United Nations, a coalition of countries known as the Group of Friends of the Family, Family Watch International, and Campaign Life Coalition, commemorated the 30th anniversary of the International Year of the Family in 1994.

Panelist Dr. Timothy Rarick of Brigham Young University — Idaho discussed the importance of balancing the ethics of individualism and community, noting that the dominant ethic in individualistic societies—like many wealthy, Western countries—is unfettered autonomy.  He spoke about social poverty, which is a lack of close and trusted relationships one can rely on, and its correlation with financial poverty. “The family is the best system for eradicating not only financial poverty but social poverty,” he said.

Rarick highlighted the importance of fathers in the lives of their sons and daughters.  Children in fatherless homes are at greater risk of poverty, teen pregnancy, obesity, criminal behavior, and poor educational outcomes.

Family Watch provided additional statistics: children raised by two parents rather than one were 40 percent less likely to be held back in school and one-fifth less likely to die as children.  Family instability, on the other hand, was associated with increased disease, stunted growth, and child mortality.

Nevertheless, we see troubling trends around the world.  More young people live with unmarried partner than a spouse, rise in out-of-wedlock births, delay or avoidance of marriage, especially in individualistic societies.

Poverty also leads to high stress, which in turn harms family relationships.  Professor and psychologist Dr. Suzanne Hollman discussed the ways in which concentrated urban poverty cultivates mental illness, which in turn exacerbates poverty. “Poverty alleviation strengthens family bonds,” said Hollman. High stress leads to less capacity for empathy, often leading to harsher parenting. “Poverty certainly exacerbates this link.”

Errol Naidoo of the Cape Town-based Family Policy Institute spoke about the context of South Africa, which has for decades been an outlier in terms of its progressive laws and policies compared with the rest of the African continent.

“Only 33 percent of children live with both biological parents in South Africa today,” said Naidoo.

He noted soaring social welfare budgets alongside a shrinking taxpayer base.  Teenage pregnancies have skyrocketed. “The ‘sexual rights’ rather than ‘sexual responsibility’ focus of South Africa’s sexuality education programs have proved catastrophic in a culture grappling with endemic family breakdown, fatherless homes, and plagued by widespread sexual exploitation and abuse of vulnerable women and children exacerbated by a failing criminal justice system,” said Naidoo.

Matt Wojciechowski of Campaign Life Coalition quoted Pope St. John Paul II’s letter on the family which called it the “first school of love.” The pope had warned of “the various programs backed by very powerful resources seeking to break down the family” and efforts “to present as normal and attractive situations that are in fact irregular.”  Wojciechowski criticized the focus of UN programs on population control through sterilization and abortion: “we cannot eradicate poverty by eradicating the poor,” he said, adding that “the family should not be reduced to a mere lifestyle choice.”

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